In the area of client/server computing, often client-related data is stored on a server. The client/server interaction is typically referred to as a “session” or “data session”. The data created, modified, or associated with this session is often referred to as “session data”. A server may measure the amount of activity with a client. The session and the session data are traditionally associated with a lifetime or period of time in which the session data will be maintained even though no activity occurs from the client. The lifetime of that data is mostly limited for various reasons, for example, security concerns, to reduce the amount of required resources consumed by maintaining the data, etc. After the time of inactivity with the client has exceeded this lifetime period, the client's session is generally terminated and the associated session data are dis-associated (e.g., deleted, etc.) with the session and the client.
Clients may actively terminate a session in case the session and session data is not needed or desired any longer. For example, when a user stops the client software, the client software may transmit a session termination message to the server, causing the session data to no longer be maintained (e.g., deleted, saved permanently and any temporary data storage deleted or un-allocated from memory). When a server services a large number of clients the active termination may reduce the number of sessions and their associated system resource usage (e.g., memory usage due to session data storage, network connection usage, etc.) considerably.
If the client software is started again, a new session is created and a user has to authenticate themselves with the server (e.g. by entering their credentials, passwords, etc.). Also, any subsequent or new session does not have access to the prior session data, as that prior session data was associated with the prior or old session, and was likely deleted as a result of the prior explicit session termination (e.g., session termination message, etc.) or an implicit session termination (e.g., by letting the lifetime period expire, etc.).